Nine months of 2019 have gone by. It’s almost ski season again, yaaay! Summit County real estate sales started the year slowly but we still had an optimistic outlook. We had the optimism that spring and summer would re-ignite the hot market we have been used to. That we would get one more summer of excited buyers. Spring had some promise but then not much happened. The buyers weren’t in a rush to find a place. We thought maybe it was the cold June we had and the warm weather would bring more activity. But it just didn’t happen. Sales haven’t been dreadful. They are down for the year, but just slightly. The market certainly doesn’t feel the same though. Buyers attitudes have changed and they are forcing the sellers to rethink things as well.
The market is different now and we’ll have to wait and see where it goes from here. I am not expecting any drastic changes in Summit County real estate sales in the near future. Perhaps just a continuation of the flat market we have been seeing this year.
As a new Summit County home owner, we found the prices to be incredibly overpriced relative to historic pricing. We have been coming to the area for 25 plus years. We finally decided to buy a home. Sold our home in Costa Rica and came to Summit to make a great family second home. That happened but we looked hard. We found a great home in Summit Estates and bought it far below the average pricing for homes based upon price per square foot. We almost gave up because we could not make sense of the home values versus just renting high end homes yearly and not messing with buying into a super frothy market, from an outsider’s perspective. The county and area has a lot to offer but at the end of the day, a home is an investment and one has to make sense of not only buying the home but pure economics of owning the home, using the home, whether to rent it our or not, the exit strategy or how that plays out. We found a great deal, very happy and love our decision. I would suggest real estate agents get really a lot more up to speed on the investment side of the decision or they will keep losing a lot of potential buyers who think the way I did. This atmosphere in Summit is incredible. Great decision.
Congrats on finding a great deal on a property! It can sometimes be a challenge to find a place that works well. Second home ownership has a lot of challenges that need to be figured out beforehand. As a previous second home owner you probably had a leg up over a lot of folks that have never thought about all the details that go along with it. I agree, a real estate purchase is an investment and has to make sense in that regard. However, enjoying the lifestyle in Summit definitely factors into that decision. If we are not helping buyers to look at all the pieces of the equation, we are not doing enough to ensure our clients know what they are getting into.